The Party (18 page)

He went through the room systematically, verifying Keller’s points: heavy closet boxes blocked the attic entrance; dusty screen screws that didn’t appear to have been touched in ages. Nothing he found proved or disproved either of the hypotheses he had presented Keller. But there were two things he noticed that struck him as unusual.

First there were the tangled Christmas tree lights hanging from the top shelf of the closet. The police had not pulled them out; he definitely recalled seeing them the night of the party. He wasn’t quite sure why he considered it significant. The overhead light had been shorted out. Wires were often used to short out other wires. The connection seemed tenuous at best.

The second thing was not even properly in the bedroom. Peering out the east facing windows at the overhang of the roof, he noticed that a small portion of a nearby wooden roof shingle—at the very edge of the overhang—was broken off. Indeed, it looked as though someone had broken it off with the heel of a foot.

Did someone enter or exit the room over the roof?

It made no sense. With the screwed down screens, any approach from the outside was impossible. And yet, when he searched both ways along the roof edge, he saw not a single other damaged shingle. Only this one directly outside the east windows.

He examined the bathroom, found the same immovable screens on the window.

He was leaving the bedroom when he noticed the fine glass shards in the center of the wooden floor. A quick examination revealed them to be from a light bulb. He grabbed the ladder, spread it in the middle of the floor. Going up the steps, he reached up and unscrewed the overhead light shade. A minute later he was staring at a busted light bulb.

But what does it mean?

Probably nothing. That was what he was afraid of.

He went through the remainder of the rooms on the upper floor. When he was done, he sat down at the top of the stairs with a paper, ruler, and pencil he had taken from one of the rooms and drew himself a diagram. He sketched the entire second floor, but only that portion of the bottom floor that seemed pertinent.

Who had been in the third bedroom appeared, on the surface, the crux of the whole matter. Yet in reality it could be of only minor importance. Alice and the murderer could both have already been in the fourth bedroom when Nick had entered. The guy could have had the gun in her mouth, and been whispering in her ear that if she so much as let out the tiniest sound…

Standing on the porch, Kats had had easy access to the roof of the house. Despite the window screens, it was something to think about.

The fourth bedroom had been extremely dark just before they had turned on the lamp. Michael didn’t recall any light from the pool entering through the south facing windows. Had the pool light been off or had the window shades been down? Would Polly have turned off the pool light while checking the chlorine? Those particular shades were certainly down now. Yet the other ones, on the east facing windows, had definitely been up. Even now, he could almost feel that cold breeze.

Bill, who had been in the kitchen, had taken an inordinate amount of time to reach the scene of the crime.

Michael heard someone come in the front door. He stood up and moved a step back into the hallway, peering down the stairs, catching a glimpse of long brown hair.

Jessica
.

He listened as she entered a downstairs room, went through a series of drawers. It sounded as if she were packing.

He had decided he would let her come and go without making himself known when he heard her start to cry. Mingled in with his grief and bitterness, he felt another emotion—guilt. Putting his diagram in his back pocket, he walked down the stairs.

She was standing in Alice’s studio, her back to the door, touching a painting on an easel. She did not jump when he said hello. She merely turned, watched him through strands of hanging hair with those big brown eyes that had always worked such strange magic on him. They were red now, and puffy. She still had on her black dress.

“I saw your car out front,” she said.

“Why didn’t you call for me?”

“I knew you didn’t want to talk to me.”

He shrugged. “I’m here. We’re both here. Why shouldn’t we talk?”

She closed her eyes, sucked in a breath, her hands trembling. His tone had not been kind. She turned away. “I came to pick up some clothes for Polly,” she said. “I’ll be gone in a minute.”

“Take your time.”

Her back to him, her head fell to her chest. His guilt sharpened, yet so did his anger. “Michael, I don’t understand,” she pleaded.

The studio was the smallest room in the house. The numerous paintings and sketches were piled one on top of the other. Alice had had a dozen brushes and color trays going at the same time. She hadn’t been what anyone would have called neat.

Michael had seen much of the work before. She used to bring her pictures into the store as she finished them: forest animals building a shopping mall in the middle of redwoods; high schools populated with penguin students—bright and silly situations that he had thought made up the best of her private universe.

As his eyes wandered over the room, however, he noticed a row of strikingly different works. A few were of alien worlds: a purple multi-tentacled creature feeding its hungry babies pieces of an American spacecraft; a hideous shivering skeleton trapped on an ice planet, trying to light a last match on the inside of its naked eye socket.

Before Clark. After Clark. I’ll find that bastard.

Michael came farther into the studio, feeling in no hurry to answer Jessica’s question. There was no carpet in here, either; and this floor was also stained.

“
I
don’t understand,” he said finally, leaning against the wall. “Here Alice gets murdered and the first thing her best friend does is tell the cops she killed herself.”

Jessica stared at him, shocked, as if he’d slapped her across the face. Then her face collapsed in despair. A tear rolled over her cheek. Then another one. He held her gaze for a long moment, feeling his bitterness beginning to teeter as she began to tremble again. He turned away. This was bad. He had to stop. He wished he could stop. He just hurt so bad—it was as if pain had taken on a demonic character inside him and was demanding he make everyone suffer as he was suffering. But he didn’t really hate Jessica.

I should have been there, in that room.

He hated himself.

It should have been me.

For being alive.

“I loved Alice,” Jessica said, struggling with each word. “I loved her more than the world. And what I said to the police, I didn’t say because I wanted to. It hurt me to say it, as much as it’s hurting me now to stand here and have you accuse me of—” She broke down then, completely, the sobs racking her body like shocks of electric current. He tried as hard as he could to go to her, to comfort her. Yet the insecure ego inside that he had deftly kept hidden all his adolescent years wouldn’t let him. He was too afraid if he so much as touched her, he would break down, too. And that he could never do, not in front of her.

He stepped instead to the easel and pulled away the covering cloth.

Go forward, I will follow.

There was no desert, no bridge over a running river. Yet the lush forest and shimmering lake of Alice’s final painting strongly reminded him of his dream. The colors were similar, and more important, the painting embodied the
feel
of his place.

He didn’t quite know what to think. A lot of people, he supposed, dreamed of a Garden of Eden. That Alice and he shared similar tastes in paradise probably meant nothing.

Nevertheless, the painting somehow evoked the peace he’d experienced in his dream. A faint ray of that peace pierced his heavy pain. He reached out and touched the canvas. Alice had placed the two of them together, walking hand in hand along the grassy path that circled the edge of the clear water. She’d had only to complete the details of his clothing and she would have been done.

Then he noticed something else, a photograph of himself propped up beside the easel. He picked it up, as Jessica began to quiet down.

“I took it the night of the game.” Jessica sniffed. “After you helped me with my camera, when you were sitting at the end of the bleachers with Nick. When Alice saw it, she told me she had to have it.” Wiping at her eyes with her arm, Jessica gently plucked it from his fingers. She smiled suddenly. “I sort of wanted it for myself, but Alice asked, and she was all excited and—what the heck, I thought.”

“Jessie.”

“No.” She set the picture on the easel at the base of the painting, picked up a small suitcase at her feet. “Let’s not talk, not now. I’ll leave. I’ll talk to you later. I’ll see you at school.”

He nodded. “Goodbye.”

She turned away. “Goodbye.”

To Be Continued…